Sexism, Racism, Class Conflict and the Social Unconscious

The power relations and consequent patterns of domination and subordination within and between cultures are internalised as individual and social unconscious dynamics and enacted in subtle ways. Cultural positions provide specific but necessarily limited views of reality and of the ‘other’, so that ‘diversity’ can only be appreciated through a dialogue that reveals our own ‘otherness' to others and to ourselves.

DB is a group analyst, family therapist and organisation consultant in private practice and Consultant Group and Family Psychotherapist at the Baobab Centre for Young Survivors in Exile. Before training as a group analyst he studied business management, physical education and the sociology of ‘race relations’ in the inner city. He has worked in the fields of suicide, psychosis and trauma from torture and political violence, working for a decade in a community mental health psychotherapy project and then for over twenty years at the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture. He is an associate editor of 'Group Analysis', and the author of one book - Counselling and Psychotherapy with Refugees - co-author of a booklet, Far from the Battle but Still at War: Troubled Refugee Children in School, and has written various articles and chapters on psychotherapy and politics,